First, thank you for this excellent and informative website.

I am have a cooling issue with a 6 year old Samsung RF323TEDBSR/AA. Starting a few days ago, out of the blue, refrigerator started to trip 20A Eaton AFCI dedicated circuit breaker, which provided a 5 blink code of “Ground Fault”. Monitored it with a clamp meter and the amperage never got above 3A. When I woke up yesterday, the fridge had power, but was not cooling.

Troubleshooting:
- Unit returns code 81 E at power on and diagnostics.
- Inverter board providing 1 blink on its red LED.
- Fans are running in both refrigerator and next to compressor.
- Compressor is not running, vibrating, nor getting warm.
- With power cord unit removed, compressor measures ~11 ohms between each pair of pins, and infinity between each pin and chassis ground.
- At room temperature, Compressor Overload Protector is closed (short) between its two connections. If I understand correctly, the Compressor Overload Protector is thermal-based. When it detects excessive heat at the compressor connect, it opens up the circuit back to the inverter board, which in turn cuts AC power back to the compressor.

Given all this, I believe I may have a bad inverter board (DA42-00782B). If the Overload protector were open, I would have thought that was bad.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Any help appreciated.

Thanks, Stu